Panda Bear’s new album is built from striking found sounds and samples: tribal drum beats, underwater sound effects, planes taking off, non-verbal vocal incantations, and various other oddities. It’s all very innovative and unusual, just the sort of one-of-a-kind pastiche you’d expect from a member of Brooklyn’s preeminent experimental pop group, Animal Collective. What makes Panda Bear’s second solo project, Person Pitch (Paw Tracks), such a revelation, though, are its lyrics. A choice hook: “Coolness is having courage to do what’s right/I try to remember always just to have a good time.”

When you think about what qualifies as honest or emotionally cathartic music these days, you hear about acts like Sufjan Stevens and the Arcade Fire. While certainly genuine, their honesty is only viable because it’s filtered through a post-ironic frame. Stevens employs thirty-word song titles and a high-school band’s worth of orchestral flourishes to make a simple, touching point; the Arcade Fire use a church organ and beat each other over the head with drumsticks to prove that they really, really mean it. Pop culture is so ingrained with sarcasm that it takes such massive productions to get anyone to pay attention. Panda Bear subverts this phenomenon by treating his voice — and by extension his message — just as playfully as he does his samples.

Opener “Comfy in Nautica” is a deceptively simple but undeniably triumphant beginning. What sounds like a train rolling by fades and breaks into a tribal loop of hand claps, foot stomps, and a one-note wordless incantation. As Panda Bear begins his aforementioned refrain, fighter jets take off across the mix and his hypnotic repetition of “good time” becomes subsumed by something akin to a spaceship. These incongruous sources — from the rails to a drum circle, to the clouds and outer space — attain the all-encompassing power of an epic journey, and yes, a good time to boot.

Thereafter, Panda Bear’s vocals are more fully absorbed into the mix. “Take Pills,” about the relief of coming off anti-depressants, is projected through a pool of soupy water, coming up for air with reassurances like “I feel stronger/We don’t need ‘em” and “Take it one day at a time.” “Bros” and “Good Girl/Carrots” both exceed twelve minutes, each comprised of a few wildly different movements bridged by sudden but seamless transitions. The latter carries a frantic house/dub beat through a jungle of incoherent bellowing into a piano-heavy declaration of autonomy, which then gives way to a third act made with a traditional reggae beat and xylophone, Panda Bear assuring us “It’s good to sometimes slow it down.” After a jarring first minute or two, the amorphous atmosphere becomes the track’s sustaining force; wherever you are, you’re about to move on.

The last track, the short and tender “Ponytails,” is a spare piano lullaby. Bookending the album with plaintive sentiments similar to how it began, Panda Bear chants, “When my soul stops growing I get so hungry/And I wish it never would stop growing.” A heavy dose of reverb makes the refrain float off into the cosmos. It’s a quiet summation of the imagination and contentment that makes Person Pitch a joyous and pure experience.

TEN YEARS, A WAVE | September 26, 2014 As the festival has evolved, examples of Fowlie’s preferred breed of film—once a small niche of the documentary universe—have become a lot more common, a lot more variegated, and a lot more accomplished.

GIRLS (AND BOYS) ON FILM | July 11, 2014 The Maine International Film Festival, now in its 17th year in Waterville, remains one of the region’s more ambitious cultural institutions, less bound by a singular ambition than a desire to convey the breadth and depth of cinema’s past and present. (This, and a healthy dose of music and human-interest documentaries.) On that account, MIFF ’14 is an impressive achievement, offering area filmgoers its best program in years. With so much to survey, let’s make haste with the recommendations. (Particularly emphatic suggestions are marked in bold print.)

AMERICAN VALUES | June 11, 2014 The Immigrant seamlessly folds elements of New York history and the American promise into a story about the varieties of captivity and loyalty.

CHARACTER IS POLITICAL | April 10, 2014 Kelly Reichardt, one of the most admired and resourceful voices in American independent cinema, appears at the Portland Museum of Art Friday night to participate in a weekend-long retrospective of her three most recent films.

LET'S TALK ABOUT SEX | April 09, 2014 Throughout its two volumes and four hours of explicit sexuality, masochism, philosophical debate, and self-analysis, Nymphomaniac remains the steadfast vision of a director talking to himself, and assuming you’ll be interested enough in him to listen and pay close attention.